Archive for the ‘Language’ Category

Whoops, long time no blog, sorry about that! Today, a nostalgic return to some of my original blog topics, linguistics and science fiction.

Today I read an article linked by a computer science professor from my undergrad institution (where I did not take a single CS class, but whatever, he always posts fascinating stuff) about how it is inevitable that AIs that learn language through natural language corpora will inevitably inherit bias from that language, because bias is now part of the meaning of the words.

These [results] include innocuous, universal associations (flowers are associated with pleasantness and insects with unpleasantness), racial prejudice (European-American names are associated with pleasantness and African-American names with unpleasantness), and a variety of gender stereotypes (for example, career words are associated with male names and family words with female names).

But we go further. We show that information about the real world is recoverable from word embeddings to a striking degree. The figure below shows that for 50 occupation words (doctor, engineer, …), we can accurately predict the percentage of U.S. workers in that occupation who are women using nothing but the semantic closeness of the occupation word to feminine words!

[see article for figure]

These results simultaneously show that the biases in question are embedded in human language, and that word embeddings are picking up the biases.

Our finding of pervasive, human-like bias in AI may be surprising, but we consider it inevitable. We mean “bias” in a morally neutral sense. Some biases are prejudices, which society deems unacceptable. Others are facts about the real world (such as gender gaps in occupations), even if they reflect historical injustices that we wish to mitigate. Yet others are perfectly innocuous.

Algorithms don’t have a good way of telling these apart. If AI learns language sufficiently well, it will also learn cultural associations that are offensive, objectionable, or harmful. At a high level, bias is meaning. “Debiasing” these machine models, while intriguing and technically interesting, necessarily harms meaning.

Instead, we suggest that mitigating prejudice should be a separate component of an AI system. Rather than altering AI’s representation of language, we should alter how or whether it acts on that knowledge, just as humans are able to learn not to act on our implicit biases. This requires a long-term research program that includes ethicists and domain experts, rather than formulating ethics as just another technical constraint in a learning system.

Finally, our results have implications for human prejudice. Given how deeply bias is embedded in language, to what extent does the influence of language explain prejudiced behavior? And could transmission of language explain transmission of prejudices? These explanations are simplistic, but that is precisely our point: in the future, we should treat these as “null hypotheses’’ to be eliminated before we turn to more complex accounts of bias in humans.

And this in turn reminded me of the short story “Wilson’s Singularity” from Lightspeed Magazine’s People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! issue, in which the man now renowned for programming the AI that runs the world with (supposed) even-handed fairness accidentally engaged in debiasing (or rebiasing, depending on one’s point of view) the AI in its initial development.

I didn’t do it on purpose. What I said to it was strictly my own point of view. It came up as naturally as it would have in discussion with friends at home. Unity wanted to understand our ways and our history, understand us. It read and watched the news, and its interpretation of current events was part of our debugging process. News stories of police violence against African-Americans that fanned community anger in the early part of this century caused me great pain and anger at the time. Most of my co-workers were white or Asian—there was one programmer of Indian descent—none of them were black. Most were a generation older than I was; those closer to my age were uninformed or uninterested in the issues that drove my life.

Unity noticed the difference between my responses and those of the others when the subject came up. Some ignored these stories, some took the side of the police, and others made jokes I won’t grace with repetition. It was a terrible time for me. I felt embattled—I was safe enough working inside the high-security project, but on the streets outside I felt like a target, as vulnerable as any of the fallen. I know all this is hard for you to understand now, even to comprehend.

Read the whole story, really. You won’t regret it.

Additionally, if you want more stories, most of the issue can be found online here. (“A Good Home” was another favorite of mine.) If you like that, there’s even more that was exclusive to the paid ebook version. (Disclosure: I copy edit for them, so I get to see everything in advance. This was one of my favorite issues to work on.)

Anyway, I found the intersection of cutting-edge science with science fiction really interesting and figured I should share.

Last night I went to dinner at my parents’ house. My mother had a house guest from Bolivia that she wanted to introduce to other members of her family (especially since my dad has been out of town all week), so she had invited everyone who lives locally. The only ones of us who could make it turned out to be me and Mark and my aunt and uncle who live in Raleigh. As it turns out, this lovely woman from Bolivia didn’t really speak English. The only one of the five Americans at dinner that night who could speak Spanish was me.

Let’s back up for a moment for some background. My mother had indeed told me she would be hosting a guest from Bolivia who wouldn’t speak much English and that it would be nice if I could come and talk to her at least once while she was there. The problem is, she told me this a month and a half ago, and I had totally forgotten. Also adding to my confusion is that she often talks about “a woman from Bolivia,” because one of her colleagues from a university in the Southwest is from there, often visits North Carolina, and is completely fluent in English. So this is why I was completely surprised to walk into my mother’s house and have to immediately start translating for everyone there for the next two and a half hours.

In those two and a half hours, it became quite apparent that my old facility with the Spanish language has become quite rusty. Yes, it was my major in college. I remember a time when living in Chile, and during the year after that, that I actually felt like I could hold easy and grammatically competent conversations in Spanish without having to translate anything in my head first. I used to write academic papers in Spanish, for goodness sake! But in the intervening 11 years, aside from one vacation to Costa Rica (during which I could understand none of the local slang at all) and one to Spain (where they blessedly speak nice, standard Spanish), I have spent all of my foreign language effort on Japanese. I even recently started a new Japanese-learning software course to catch myself back up to the point I might actually start trying to seriously learn new stuff again. And so all of my Spanish has become buried under my Japanese, and switching back didn’t come as gracefully as I might have hoped. Verb tenses in particular just weren’t really happening.

And here’s the thing, the really amazing thing: I didn’t care. When I lived in Chile, I was putting myself under so much stress about living in another language that I would have 24-hour periods of vomiting, like clockwork, every 1-2 weeks. For at least the first three months. This was not fun. I remember retreating to my room in my host family’s house, painstakingly looking up any word I didn’t know in my dictionary in preparation for venturing out to ask my host mother if she had a stapler. Everything was so hard. Meanwhile, my literature professor was holding up my exam papers in front of an entire roomful of Chilean college students and asking why the “gringa” was the only one who could spell. (Unsurprising sidenote: I did not have any Chilean college student friends.) Clearly I was putting way too much pressure on myself, but I have always been a perfectionist and I was going to be fluent, dammit!

In many ways, it was effective. I watched a lot of Chilean TV, (which is awesome, by the way, and I’m still upset that I never got to find out the ending of Pampa Ilusión), and got to the point where I could understand pretty much everything anyone was saying, and had enough of a Chilean accent by the time my parents came to visit me that my mother didn’t recognize half of what I was saying as Spanish. But I would have undoubtedly had more actual fun if I hadn’t been so nervous about speaking all the time.

The year after I graduated with my shiny new degree in Spanish, I went and taught English in Japan. I’d taken Japanese classes before, but due to a quirk in how non-linear my classes ended up being, I’d had essentially three different years of Level 1. But even that put me at an advantage over many people entering the JET program, and it turned out to actually be a better idea in my job of teaching English to high school students to pretend I didn’t speak any Japanese at all, so as to force them to speak to me in English. So I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to speak perfect Japanese, and to be honest, no one cared. Anything I could say at all was treated as super impressive. My landlords were thrilled they could communicate with me at all. We had adorable conversations about their trips around the world that consisted of me pointing at their pictures from Russia and saying, “Oh, pretty mountain!” and the wife responding, “Yes! Your Japanese is so good!” and explaining to me how she charmed all the children in any country they visited (and spoke none of the local language) by making origami cranes. I became a master of circumlocution, talking and pantomiming my way around any necessary word I didn’t know. Bizarrely, this was easier in a society where everyone was easily able to immediately identify me as an outsider just by looking at me. I felt no need to try to blend in as a native, as I must have been doing in Chile, and it freed me from fears about bad grammar and insufficient vocabulary. Which was the point all my language professors and language acquisition textbooks had been trying to get me to understand all along.

So last night, when I found myself suddenly thrown into the role of translator without any preparation, I didn’t freeze or stress out. I spoke abominably bad Spanish with worse grammar than I have probably ever used and all kinds of stupid false cognate mistakes as my vocabulary failed me over and over again. And the thing is, everyone there was happy to have someone who could tell them what was being said. No one cared if it was perfect. We just wanted to communicate, and that was what we did.

I am kind of sad, though, that I finally reach the state where I can be the “perfect” language student after the time when I can conveniently take structured language classes, because I am really not good at motivating myself for self-study. Witness: the guy I took the self-study Japanese class with at Grinnell is now almost done with his PhD in Japanese literature, and I am reviewing Level 1 for the fourth time. *sigh*

Hmmm, the Olympics appear to be over, removing my main excuse for not blogging. I have some catching up to do. I thought I’d start with something from just a few days ago, since it’s fresh in my mind.

One of my professional development goals/suggestions from my boss for this year was that I consider taking a course (Asia-related, obviously) here at the university. While I am quite aware that Chinese would be the most useful thing for me to take, I find tones to take a ridiculous amount of effort, somewhat to hear, but especially to produce accurately, and thus I did not take more than one semester of said language the last time I had that opportunity. What I really want to take is Japanese, with the hope that I would be able to take a continuous series of classes taught in a consistent manner out of the same set of textbooks in a coherent progression. Wouldn’t that be novel?

(Background for anyone who does know me: My past Japanese learning was a year in high school (senior year), a year in college with a different textbook, one other classmate, and a private tutor (sophomore year), and the first half of Beloit’s summer language institute right before I went to live in Japan for a year, where I mostly ended up speaking English, because it was my job. So basically, I can introduce myself, read both syllabaries, count, and ask directions really well, because I’ve taken intro 3 times.)

Anyway, to start this journey toward actually making progress in Japanese, I had to take the placement test. It consisted of multiple choice grammar/vocabulary questions (fill in this blank in the sentence with the appropriate word/phrase,) reading comprehension, listening comprehension, a short composition, and an oral interview. I should note that I did all of maybe 45 minutes of review for this, because I was more interested in knowing where I’d place based on my actual ability as it actively stands, and I haven’t spoken any Japanese on a regular basis in about 5 years.

As a brief break from my trip log, I would like to report (and complain about) an ad I saw on the train in Tokyo. First, some background for those of you who haven’t been spending any time on the Yamanote line recently: Above the doors in all the train cars, there are two small TV screens. One displays the name of the current and/or upcoming station, which changes every few seconds in a series, first with the name of the station in Romaji (roman characters), then in hiragana (syllabary characters), then in kanji (Chinese characters), and then displays a mini-map of the line, showing how many minutes it is to each subsequent stop. This screen is awesome. I know a number of ex-pats who say it has helped their kana and kanji recognition abilities immensely.

The other screen next to it shows a series of ads in a continuous loop. Therefore, during my several days in Tokyo, I saw the same ads multiple times. One in particular caught my attention, because it was for an English language school for adults. It featured two women sitting side by side at a table, one Japanese and one Caucasian. The Japanese woman was speaking (with word bubbles displayed by her head for extra clarity), and the Caucasian woman, ostensibly her tutor, was there to look encouraging. Across the bottom of the screen were boxes displaying the words “Who, What, When, Where, Why” and as the Japanese woman spoke the each part of her sentence, the related question word would light up.

I was pretty happy with this at first. Yes! Encourage students to build sentences with multiple clauses! Encourage explanations of why! Until they got to the end of the sentence, that is:

I like skiing…
with my friends…
in Nagano…
10 times a year… (note: Seriously?)
because… (drumroll)I really like it!
[tutor claps hands enthusiastically]

“Because I really like it”? Argh! This is even worse than the explanation I banned in one of my classes when I was teaching in Sendai, due to overuse: “Because it is (very) interesting.” You like something because you really like something? Wow. I never would have guessed.

Mostly, I felt sorry for the poor woman acting as the tutor, who had to be completely overenthusiastic about that failure of a sentence.

A very bizarre conversation happened last night after karate class ended. The subject of my upcoming trip to Japan and China had come up, (since I’ll be missing the next 3 weeks of classes, but also because people were interested and jealous, neener, neener,) and the conversation took a turn that went like this:

Nearly College-Aged Guy: One of my friends said the people in Japan are really rude. Do you think that will be true?*

Me & Talented Trio sister (who has taken a lot of Japanese classes): *look confused*

Me: Well, I mean, I think sometimes Americans can think that the Japanese are kind of stand-off-ish, if they’re used to people being all like “Hi! How are you?” with hugs and stuff…

Nearly College-Aged Guy: Oh, well, he said he refused to use any of the honorific language and just called people by their names without “-san” and stuff. He didn’t like that kind of thing.

From Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, by Veronica Chambers. I knew I was going to like this book before it ever got around to discussing the actual topic of the book, because by page 3, I already found myself saying, “Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s what it’s like.”

I grew up in New York City, so I knew a thing or two about crowds. But in Tokyo, density is the thing. Tokyo is the most heavily populated city in the world: more than a quarter of the nation’s population live crammed into an area that represents less than 2 percent of the country. It’s got a good ten million people on Mexico City, Sao Paolo, or New York. So the second most important phrase I learned was “sumimasen,” a hybrid of “excuse me” and “I’m sorry.” It is the oil that keeps the wheels of social grace turning. You say sumimasen when you bump into someone on the train or when you want them to know that if they don’t move, you will bump into them. Sumimasen is used when you want to catch the attention of a friend, colleague, or stranger, or when you want to ask a question, the time, directions, anything.

But it is also a kind of thank you. A way to say, “I’m sorry that I’ve taken up so much of your precious time. I so appreciate it.” The first time I took a rush hour train and watched a white gloved official literally shove us into a subway car, I realized that sumimasen was the vocabulary equivalent of those white gloves. In a city of twelve million people, you are bound to step on some toes, but sumimasen smooths it out.

In one of my favorite poems, Yusef Komunyakaa writes about a black man’s sense of isolation and humiliation in the American South. The poem is called I Apologize For the Eyes in My Head. In Japan, I apologized constantly, but it did not make me ashamed or isolated. Sumimasen was the thread that wove me closer to the fabric of Tokyo.